Two French anti-discrimination organizations are suing tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for not being aggressive enough in their content moderation, according to Libération.
SOS Racisme, SOS Homophobie, and the UEJF (Union of Jewish students in France) are basing their suit on a report analyzing 586 offensive posts they tracked for over a month. They found that Facebook deleted 34% of the flagged posts, while YouTube deleted 7% and Twitter 4%.
French law requires websites to delete posts with illicit content in a “reasonable” amount of time and to forward the info on to the authorities. Hate speech is a criminal offense in France, including speech online.
The organizations believe that these tech companies’ content moderation policies are noncompliant with French law.
“The mystery that shrouds the social media’s moderation teams operations prevents any serious progress in the diminishing of racist and antisemitic messages,” said Sacha Reingewirtz, President of the UEJF in a statement. “Since such big platforms neither respect the French law nor their own terms of use, they will have to face justice.”